Sunday, September 20, 2009

No matter what direction quarterback Jordan Jefferson looks when he’s trying to make things happen for LSU’s offense, he finds somebody with a lot of experience.

So unless Jefferson keeps the ball himself or gives it away to Russell Shepard, he always knows somebody who has been there and done that is about to get the ball in his hands.

Saturday’s 31-3 victory against Louisiana-Lafayette was a testament to the tools at Jefferson’s disposal.

When No. 7-ranked LSU (3-0, 1-0 SEC) plays at Mississippi State (2-1, 1-1) at 11:21 a.m. Saturday (on WAFB), it will be the next chance for Jefferson to reach into the offensive toolbox and see if he and LSU can be a little more productive.

The Tigers are generating a respectable 325.7 total yards per game and have topped 320 yards in each game this season.

Veterans are at the heart of LSU’s production. Senior running backs accounted for 118 of the 164 rushing yards against the Cajuns — Scott with 63 yards, Williams with 41 and Holliday with 14. Scott also caught a 1-yard TD pass and Holliday dashed 11 yards into the end zone on a run.

“It’s a really good feeling having all of those guys around me,” Jefferson said after hitting 16 of 25 passes for 165 yards. “I know those guys are going to get the yards and catch the ball for me. I’m going to keep feeding them the ball, and they’re going to keep doing good things with it.”

Nobody can question whether Jefferson is learning on the job.

There was more evidence of that Saturday as Jefferson made sure he got the ball to his most veteran playmakers at the right time.

Of LSU’s seven third-down conversions (in 12 chances), five came on pass plays to Dickson, LaFell and Toliver. The other two were on running plays: Williams’ 12-yard scamper on an option and Scott’s 2-yard blast from the fullback position in the third quarter.

After three games, it seems like Toliver has emerged as Jefferson’s top choice on third downs. On a drive that led to a 52-yard Josh Jasper field goal on the last play of the first half, Tolliver caught three third-down passes to keep the chains moving.

The lanky junior receiver repeatedly faced man coverage Saturday, and time after time he ran crisp curl patterns ranging from 10-15 yards, usually standing wide open with no defender close enough to make a difference.

With the right combination of size, explosion off the line of scrimmage and power to separate from the defender, Toliver has become an attractive target for Jefferson whenever defenses devote too much attention to LaFell split wide and Dickson roaming over the middle.

LaFell leads LSU with 14 receptions and three TD catches, while Toliver has 13 grabs and a team-best 15.8 yards per catch.

Likewise, the ball has been spread just as evenly on the ground. Scott has 37 carries and Williams 27 — both for 164 yards. Jefferson has carried 19 times for 112 yards.

Despite the 3-0 start, an undercurrent of grumbling among the fans persists that LSU hasn’t tapped its offensive potential.

That’s news to Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen, who said LSU has “unbelievable talent at every position on offense.”

“Their offense is loaded with NFL talent at every position,” Mullen said Sunday. “It’s not the one thing you have to stop with them.

“They have a big, physical, strong offensive line and some really big powerful backs that have played a lot of football. You want to go load ’em up and stop the run, they’ve got a really athletic quarterback that can break contain and get out there and cause problems for you. You go to contain him, and you look out there and have every five-star wide receiver that’s come out of high school the last 3-4 years. It’s the depth of their talent across the board. There’s so much balance for them across the board, and that’s what makes them so difficult to defend.”

At times this season, the cast of playmakers has been tough to stop.

But consistency has been elusive, and LSU coach Les Miles doesn’t hide his dissatisfaction with the sporadic performance in the running game.

For the second week in a row, Miles spent part of his postgame session lamenting the inability to line up and grind out the clock once LSU had a comfortable lead.

Scott bulled his way to 42 yards in the final quarter, but there was never a sense LSU was controlling the line of scrimmage.

The Tigers are averaging 4.6 yards per carry and 163.7 rushing yards per game.

“We have too many good runners to not run the football more efficiently, so that’s our quest,” Miles said.

To all of the naysayers who didn't think the Tigers looked very good against Washington, and who laughed at Les Miles when he said that the Huskies were tough... what do you say now that they beat #3 USC??? I think I hear crickets chirping!

Friday, September 18, 2009

The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning in East Baton Rouge Parish until 2 p.m. after a funnel cloud was spotted near Port Allen moving northeast at 15 miles per hour.

According to the alert at just after 1:30 p.m., the National Weather Service warning stated that several reports of a funnel cloud or tornado had been received from the Hollywood Casino Baton Rouge area.

Mike Chustz, a spokesman for East Baton Rouge Parish Emergency Medical Services, said no injuries have been reported.

Chustz said he saw the funnel cloud about 1:45 p.m. near Port Allen. Chustz said he thought the cloud, which he didn’t think had touched down, lasted six to eight minutes. It broke apart and went back into the clouds.

Regardless, Chustz said, EMS said the agency is still receiving a lot of calls from the LSU area.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Google's homepage is today given over to a "doodle" showing a flying saucer hovering over crop circles. The word "Google" is spelt out in several crop circles, with what appears to be a tractor completing the letter "L".

The internet giant also posted a tweet on its Twitter account with the map reference 51.327629, -0.5616088, which eagle-eyed sci-fi fans have identified as the centre of the small town of Horsell in Surrey. This was the spot where HG Wells set the first UFO landing in his novel The War of the Worlds.

Everyone's trying to read deep significance into this. Is it about abduction? Or aliens? Or Horsell? Or just crop circles? No. It's almost certainly a viral marketing campaign teasing people ahead of some launch in a week or two. One possible explanation is that it's trailing an online "happening" that will coincide with the 143rd anniversary of Wells's birth next week.

Crop circles were once fascinating additions to the English countryside, but now they have become tacky vehicles for corporations to advertise just about anything. A cottage industry has grown up with groups of circle-makers ready - for a price - to reproduce just about anything. The Royal Bank of Scotland, Disney, NBC, UKTV, Red Bull, Greenpeace, Microsoft, Nike, Shredded Wheat, Pepsi, Weetabix, the BBC, The Sun, Mitsubishi, O2, Big Brother, National Geographic, and the Discovery Channel have all paid to emblazon fields with their signatures.

Friday, September 11, 2009

The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.

This effort to reshape the American psyche has nothing to do with healing the nation and everything to do with easing the nation along in the ongoing radical transformation of America that President Obama promised during last year's election campaign. The president signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, but it's not likely many lawmakers thought this meant that day was going to be turned into a celebration of ethanol, carbon emission controls, and radical community organizing.

The administration's plans were outlined in an Aug. 11 White House-sponsored teleconference call run by Obama ally Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus, and Liv Havstad, the group's senior vice president of strategic partnerships and programs.

Yearwood, who uses the honorific "Reverend" before his name, has been in the news in recent years, usually for getting arrested. After Democrats took back Congress, the rowdy activist was handcuffed outside a congressional hearing in September 2007 when Gen. David Petraeus was to testify. Yearwood told the "Democracy Now" radio program that he wanted to attend the hearing to hear Petraeus give his report. "I knew that when officers lie, soldiers die," he said.

On the Aug. 11 call, Yearwood and other leaders kept saying repeatedly that they wanted 9/11 to be used for something "positive," "forward-leaning," and "productive," said a source with knowledge of the teleconference.

The plan is to turn a "day of fear" that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.

"They think it needs to be taken back from the right," said the source. "They're taking that day and they're breaking it because it gives Republicans an advantage. To them, that day is a fearful day."

A coalition including the unsavory left-wing pressure group Color of Change and about 60 far-left, environmentalist, labor, and corporate shakedown groups participated in the call. Groups on the call included: ACORN, AFL-CIO, Apollo Alliance, Community Action Partnership, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, 80 Million Strong for Young American Jobs, Friends of the Earth, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Mobilize.org, National Black Police Association, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, National Council of Negro Women, National Wildlife Federation, RainbowPUSH Coalition, Urban League, and Young Democrats of America.

Color of Change is the extremist racial grievance group that isn't happy that TV's Glenn Beck did several news packages on Van Jones, the self-described "communist" and "rowdy black nationalist" who became the president's green jobs czar after jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon. The White House may be behind a push to destroy Beck by convincing advertisers to stop buying time on his show. Jones was also on the board of the Apollo Alliance, a hard-left environmentalist group that is now running large chunks of the Obama administration. The group has acknowledged that it dictated parts of the February stimulus bill to Congress.

With the help of the Obama administration, the coalition is launching a public relations campaign under the radar of the mainstream media -- which remains almost uniformly terrified of criticizing the nation's first black president -- to try to change 9/11 from a day of reflection and remembrance to a day of activism, food banks, and community gardens.

"The organizing term is to 'go dark.' You don't tell the press, don't tell people you think will tell the press," said the source.

Of course, the annual commemoration of the 2001 terrorist attacks belongs to the entire nation, but President Obama and the activist left don't see it that way. They view the nationwide remembrance of the murder of 3,000 Americans by Islamic totalitarians as an obstacle to winning over the hearts and minds of the American people.

"When you criticize them, they are prepared to say, 'Did you want 9/11 to be another day of selling mattresses, like Presidents Day?" the source said. "They are truly trying to change the American mindset."

They view Sept. 11 as a "Republican" day because it focuses the public on supposedly "Republican" issues like patriotism, national security, and terrorism. According to liberals, 9/11 was long ago hijacked by Republicans and their enablers and unfairly used to bludgeon helpless Democrats at election time.

MSNBC's foremost left-wing bloviator, Keith Olbermann, summed up this ugly perspective the week after the Republican Party convention last year:

"But 9/11 has become a brand name. A Republican campaign slogan. Propaganda of the lowest form. 9/11 has become 9/11 with a trademark logo. "9/11 TM" has sustained a president who long ago should have been dismissed, or impeached. It has kept him and his gang of financial and constitutional crooks in office without -- literally -- any visible means of support. "9/11 TM" has made possible the greatest sleight-of-hand in our nation's history."

On Aug. 4, the White House offered a glimpse into its plans to desecrate 9/11 for political advantage. Jones appeared in a largely ignored 33-minute video posted on the official blog of the White House to discuss the administration's plan to flush 9/11 down the memory hole just as it has tried to do by rechristening the Global War on Terror the "Overseas Contingency Operations."

Of this National Day of Service, Jones says little except that it will be a great opportunity "for people to connect, to find other people in your peer group who are also passionate about repowering America but also greening up America and cleaning up America."

On the same day, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Department of Energy Under Secretary Kristina Johnson and activists held a low-key press conference. At it, Yearwood said the National Day of Service will be "the first milestone" of a larger effort called Green the Block that is attempting to convince Americans that the utopian fantasy of a so-called green economy is possible without turning the U.S. into a Third World country.

"From policy creation to community implementation, the Green the Block campaign wants to see access and opportunity created for all Americans, to build prosperity and a healthier planet for future generations," Yearwood said.

At no time does anyone explain why this National Day of Service has to be held -- of all the 365 days in a year -- on Sept. 11.

NOTE: I would also like to point out that the advertisement agency DDB Brasil and the Manhattan non-profit group The One Club are anti-American and that they totally SUCK for their endorsement of this tasteless ad exploiting 9/11.

The ad appeared online bearing the WWF's famous panda logo and showed dozens of planes diving at lower Manhattan with the tag line: "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it."

The ad surfaced - days before the eighth anniversary of the attack - when it won a merit award from The One Club, a nonprofit that promotes "excellence" in advertising. Just one problem - the WWF says the image was created on specifications by a Brazilian ad agency, DDB Brasil, that were never approved.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Everyone from brides and grooms to movie studio execs are celebrating the upcoming calendrical anomaly in their own way.

In Florida, at least one county clerk's office is offering a one-day wedding special for $99.99. The rarity of this Sept. 9 hasn't been lost on the creators of the iPod, who have moved their traditional Tuesday release day to Wednesday to take advantage of the special date. Focus Features is releasing their new film "9," an animated tale about the apocalypse, on the 9th.

Not only does the date look good in marketing promotions, but it also represents the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we'll see for almost a century (until January 1, 2101), or a millennium (mark your calendars for January 1, 3001), depending on how you want to count it.

Though technically there's nothing special about the symmetrical date, some concerned with the history and meaning of numbers ascribe powerful significance to 09/09/09.

For cultures in which the number nine is lucky, Sept. 9 is anticipated – while others might see the date as an ominous warning.

Math Magic

Modern numerologists — who operate outside the realm of real science — believe that mystical significance or vibrations can be assigned to each numeral one through nine, and different combinations of the digits produce tangible results in life depending on their application.

As the final numeral, the number nine holds special rank. It is associated with forgiveness, compassion and success on the positive side as well as arrogance and self-righteousness on the negative, according to numerologists.

Though usually discredited as bogus, numerologists do have a famous predecessor to look to. Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and father of the famous theorem, is also credited with popularizing numerology in ancient times.

"Pythagoras most of all seems to have honored and advanced the study concerned with numbers, having taken it away from the use of merchants and likening all things to numbers," wrote Aristoxenus, an ancient Greek historian, in the 4th century B.C.

As part of his obsession with numbers both mathematically and divine, and like many mathematicians before and since, Pythagoras noted that nine in particular had many unique properties.

Any grade-schooler could tell you, for example, that the sum of the two-digits resulting from nine multiplied by any other single-digit number will equal nine. So 9x3=27, and 2+7=9.

Multiply nine by any two, three or four-digit number and the sums of those will also break down to nine. For example: 9x62 = 558; 5+5+8=18; 1+8=9.

Sept. 9 also happens to be the 252nd day of the year (2 + 5 +2)...

Loving 9

Both China and Japan have strong feelings about the number nine. Those feelings just happen to be on opposite ends of the spectrum.

The Chinese pulled out all the stops to celebrate their lucky number eight during last year's Summer Olympics, ringing the games in at 8 p.m. on 08/08/08. What many might not realize is that nine comes in second on their list of auspicious digits and is associated with long life, due to how similar its pronunciation is to the local word for long-lasting (eight sounds like wealth).

Historically, ancient Chinese emperors associated themselves closely with the number nine, which appeared prominently in architecture and royal dress, often in the form of nine fearsome dragons. The imperial dynasties were so convinced of the power of the number nine that the palace complex at Beijing's Forbidden City is rumored to have been built with 9,999 rooms.

Japanese emperors would have never worn a robe with nine dragons, however.

In Japanese, the word for nine is a homophone for the word for suffering, so the number is considered highly unlucky – second only to four, which sounds like death.

Many Japanese will go so far as to avoid room numbers including nine at hotels or hospitals, if the building planners haven't already eliminated them altogether.